wans

Enterprises currently face challenges regarding
the price, performance, and flexibility of traditional
wide area networks (WANs). Aggressive growth in
the adoption of public cloud services (a projected
86% spike between 2014 and 2018)1
is forcing
organizations to look elsewhere for a more effective
network solution to address distributed traffic across
remote sites and branch offices.
Some of the specific issues organizations face with
their traditional WANs include:
- High total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Lengthy provisioning cycles
- Performance degradation with the growth of cloud
traffic
- Inadequate redundancy and resiliency
- Lack of application-aware connectivity
To better manage WAN investments, enterprises are
adopting a new approach for their distributed branch
office networks. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN)
offers improved performance, agility, and operational
flexibility plus significant cost savings. But not all SDWAN
solutions are created equal.

For many organizations, the wide area network (WAN) infrastructure that connects an enterprise’s remote and branch
offices has not changed for decades. Over the years, organizations consolidated many regional data centers into a few
highly available data center locations which meant that remote locations had to connect to centralized applications over
WANs and all internet traffic went through these data centers as well. This introduced bandwidth constraints and latency
issues. The development in WAN optimization provided incremental and measurable improvement in WAN performance
and provided some bandwidth cost containment. However, that technology typically was only deployed at the most
problematic sites that struggled to achieve acceptable levels of performance and user experience. It did not solve all the
issues with WAN connectivity.
WAN infrastructure planning was limited to increases in capacity that were met by provisioning additional carrier MPLS
(multiprotocol label switching)

Wide areas networks (WANs) are essential to the majority of businesses, connecting remote locations and individuals back to centralized IT resources. But as the network is expected to handle more bandwidth intensive applications such as voice and video it is essential to ensure the WAN usage is well managed – eliminating unwanted traffic and accelerating business content.

Are you ready to leverage the flexibility and power of mobile and cloud computing? ZK Research outlines the limitations of legacy WANs and provides recommendations for transforming your network into a strategic asset. See why the Cisco ISR 4451-AX is your building block for evolving the WAN.
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